This panel explores the question of the affected body in twentieth century Iran, with a particular focus given to the ways in which corporeal experience may or may not lead to subjective formation beyond the disciplined body and how these bodies in turn shape their respective environment around them. In particular, we examine how various incarnations of what may be called ritual affect the material body, and how these affected bodies and their formal manifestations create the basis for collective mimesis. From this foundation, this panel considers how these material bodies in turn produce alternative subjectivities and inter-subjectivities in various contexts in twentieth century Iran. In doing so, we hope to investigate hereto unexamined potentialities of the body within contemporary Iran.
Within this theoretical framework, this panel analyzes a diverse array of sites of corporeal experience. Utilizing textual, auditory, and filmic sources, we offer analyses of the following manifestations of the affected human form: 1) the imprisoned body: How did the emergence of modern penal practice in Iran produce new and contingent notions of embodied citizenship and rights, such that the body of the newly minted political prisoner constantly evoked the question: Is citizenship predicated on (or destroyed by) the suffering of the prisoner's bodyd; 2) the ecstatic body: What is the role of the body within contemporary Sufi zikr rituals, and how might the achievement of annihilation of the self (fanaa) and the rational subject through sensorial engagement have ramifications for the larger social realm; 3) the tortured body: Against the notion that politics is based on contract but rather on the politics as sacrifice, what is the role of torture as a form of ritual shaping Iranian Leftist bodies and culture in the 1970s; 4) the represented/authentic body: what is the relationship between the cinematic renderings of the body in the ethnographic documentaries produced in the last two decades of the Pahlavi Era and the emergent "discourse of authenticity" present in the works of public intellectuals of the time (such as Al-e Ahmad) calling for a "return to the roots"?
Ultimately, by traversing these diverse fields of inquiry, this panel investigates the ways in which the body affects and is similarly affected by the context from which it arises. Indeed, by analyzing how the specifically material nature of corporeal experience lends itself to subject formation, we are able to examine the way bodily experience inserts itself into the heart of Iranian modernity.
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Dr. Neda Bolourchi
This paper explores the use of terror and torture as catalysts for community building and political action amongst the Iranian Left from 1963-1979. Against the notion that politics is based solely on contract, I begin by re-examining politics and nation-state formation based on the possibility of sacrifice. With this divergent lens, I examine the Pahlavi government’s transition from terror to torture – in the name of constructing an idealized Iran - in the early 1970s onwards as an alternative means of communication. Using Bataille, I argue that the state’s actions precipitated reciprocal forms of creating and sustaining political meaning. Specifically, I assert that the state’s authoritarian then arbitrary use of such rituals of pain catalyzed communication as an ecstatic experience where the boundaries between self and other dissipate from a severe disruption of the self, a psychic laceration. However, in contrast to Clastres’ examination of rituals of pain as a moment when society “tak[es] possession of the body” and makes “certain that the intensity of the suffering is pushed to its highest point” to “giv[e] notice of membership,” the nation-state is not built or reified in hierarchical, state systems where the law is not applied in an egalitarian manner. Rather than creating or consolidating the nation-state, torture serves as the means of community building amongst those similarly situated through the psychic laceration. This disruption of the self is a sacrifice (the giving of part or all of the self) that represents the death of the individual ego as well as a communication/communion. This loss of self - the portion of the being that remains after the torture, the “remainder which is not eliminated by negation,” “the accursed share” - culminates as more and more citizens become victims of the arbitrary state. This accursed share then forms the counter-discourse to the idealized Iran asserted by the Pahlavi state. Using archival works and the publications of the Leftist literati of the 1970s, I argue, the nation-state (in its new or status quo position) becomes the higher transcendent authority to which and for which the need to love and to lose oneself can become the de jure state culminating in Iran as the sacred, as the universal god.
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Ms. Seema Golestaneh
Based on ethnographic and textual research, this paper examines the role of the body within contemporary zikr rituals of various Sufi orders throughout post-revolutionary Iran. The zikr ritual, as the name implies, is above all a ritual of remembrance, one in which the participants try to become as conscious and mindful of their God as possible, accomplished in part by disregarding the external world. How such a metaphysical endeavor is achieved, however, is through a highly sensorial process, characterized primarily by bodily movement and chanting, which aims to illustrate and make tangible the internal process of remembrance. As such, this paper will explore the relationship between intentional listening (sama) and the body, with specific attention given to the role of motion, transfiguration, and the role of mimesis. Beginning with a brief discussion of prescribed vs. non-prescribed bodily movements within Sufi orders, the focus of this paper will be understanding the role of the material body within zikr as a space of metaphysical mimesis (Taussig 1992). Ultimately, my suggestion is that through the listening act, the body is activated to come in contact and hence act in accordance with the auditory elements of the ritual.
The paper will henceforth focus upon a discussion of the relationship between the thematics of annihilation (fanaa), mimesis, listening, and with what al-Ghazzali decreed the “third station” of listening: motion. Representing the highest state of enlightenment on the Sufi path, the episode of annihilation provides a crucial space for the emergence of a metaphysical event, one of desolation and openness—that which remains after the eradication of self—that in turn allows for the formulation of a new ontology. In effect, this annihilation conveys the listening subjectivity into a state of vulnerability and absence, whereby once evacuated of the concept of self, it becomes amenable to the remote possibility of a divine transfiguration. It is in this way that we return again to the thematics of transfiguration within the zikr, as we may gradually come to understand the transfigurative event here as a form of mimesis (i.e. imitation arising from contact) that may ultimately offer an alternative to the Foucauldian disciplined body.
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Dr. Golnar Nikpour
This paper looks at the embodied experience of painful feeling in the making of political worlds in Iranian modernity. As such, it is concerned with techniques of painful punishment — often termed torture — in the prisons of Pahlavi Iran. The figure of the body-in-pain, as well as the closely related martyr-in-pain, is invoked consistently in the literature of Iranian prisoners and thinkers, not to mention theorists of modernity from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Talal Asad. But what is this specter of the state-disciplined body-in-pain, and what does it do? What does it mean to name pain or torture as such, and to locate that feeling on or in the human body? What kind of political collectivities do these expressions of pain engender? How did the emergence of modern penal practice in Iran produce new and contingent notions of embodied citizenship and rights?
This paper will offer readings of a number of early 20th century works by both religious and lay political thinkers, as well as pre-revolutionary prison memoirs (beginning with genre-inaugurating texts by Bozorg Alavi). The paper also looks at the histories of organizations forged in penal institutions, tracks increasingly sophisticated state techniques of policing and punishment, and ends with a discussion of the emergence of global discourses that claim political rights on behalf of prisoners in pain. I argue that the prison is a quintessential political site; it has been a place in which modern political subjectivities take shape. The modern prison—beginning with the building of Qasr Prison the 1920s—has been emergent space in which Iranian state power is enacted, contested, and produced. It is in the prison that the consolidating state came face to face with those challenging its authority on both existential and practical grounds, and it is from this site that nascent questions about rights, sovereignty, and “martyrdom” confronted a regime attempting to consolidate its control. Both dissident discourses and state practices were thus constituted in the shadow of the relationship between the state and its prisoners. Indeed, the newly minted “political prisoner”—whose body was assumed to be enduring profound pain—quickly became one of the most irrepressible and anxiety-inducing presences in the Iranian political sphere. That is to say, the political prisoner constantly evoked the questions: who has the right to be considered a citizen? Is citizenship predicated on (or destroyed by) the suffering of the body?
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Farbod Honarpisheh
“Fashioning a New National Body Through a Cinematic New: Ethnographic Documentaries of the Iranian New Wave and the Discourse of Authenticity”
This essay explores the relationship between the cinematic renderings of the body in the ethnographic documentaries produced in the last two decades of the Pahlavi Era and the emergent “discourse of authenticity” during the same time. On the thematic level, then, the main track of this essay takes up a number of exemplary ethnographic documentaries (for instance, Arbaeen, Wind of Jinn, O Protector of Deer), dealing with religious rituals (Ashura, Arbaeen, and pilgrimage to Shia shrines) and directed by modernist filmmakers like Parviz Kimiavi and Nasser Taghvai and subjects them to close textual analysis. On the same register, a historical account of the development of state institutions (above all, Ministry of Culture and National Television) that functioned a supportive environment for them will be offered. Through formal analysis it will be shown, in detail, how the “pro-filmic” body of the subjects filmed, just as it has often been in the case of ethnographic films in other times and other places, leave their mark on the aesthetic qualities of these cinematic texts. This process of the materiality of the body—in its movements, rhythms, textures, sounds, silences, shades of color—affecting, in fact re-fashioning, the formal qualities of these film is of course a recurrent dynamics in the histories of both modernist as well as ethnographic modes of filmmaking, where the desire for aesthetic renewal often encounters the desire for the local and the authentic. Furthermore, on the second main track of the essay, I will situate the documentaries of the Iranian New Wave in the larger context of the ascendant discourse of authenticity articulated by the country’s leading public intellectuals—chief among them, Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Ehsan Naraqi, and Dariush Shaygan—who, in one form or another, were calling for “cultural rootedness.” Accordingly, disobeying the customs of the discipline of Film Studies, I will seize “images” of body from the writings of these authors (from Al-e Ahmad’s Ziarat and Lost In the Crowd, for instance) and juxtapose them next to those cinematic ones, in the hope of foregrounding their correspondences.
